Ok...OKAY.. I've lifted this straight off the forum page and bunged it here...'cos it's relevant ok? and new, so it's gotta be better than some of the older stuff I pasted up on Tuesday...if it floats ya, check out the fuller debate in the forum...

NiGL

The BBC are the people who erased and dumped ALL the early Jimi Hendrix and Beatles footage from TOTP's.
They have NO IDEA of the importance of the archive/lineage they control.

Of course EVERYONE'S now aware of the true value of archive footage, so the BBC try to come over as sober custodians of the material and its historical legacy to the people of the UK... Let's not forget it's OUR FOOTAGE. We paid for the bloody things to get made in the fuckin' 1st place.

That arguement could also be addressed to all the series available on BBC DVD. We paid for those shows to get made and now we're paying AGAIN to OWN them. Hang on, don't we already own them!
The TRUTH is that the BBC is old and hopelessly out of touch and useless at seeing the true potential of it's back catalogue. IE: Making it ALL available FREE.
I've bought DVD's dubbed/ripped off of a French music television programme on eBay, they arrived in a plain plain wrapper, no box, no pictures and no info and it cost Â£16! (Pat Metheny jazz guitarist) the discs are worth it to me as it's a particularly brilliant gig and the DVD quality is superb...I've since returned to this seller's page but he's no longer trading..whether he was shut down by ebay or has just packed in for a bit, who knows?
I recently bought two jazz tutorial DVD's that, it turned out were burnt copies with photcopy covers. Not that i'm complaining!... they were only a fiver each.

eBay can't control the proliferating market in newly ripped to disc film/tv media, so it's always worth keeping an eye as to just what other folk are punting out there..
We're all becoming Broadcasters via this cheap ripping/copying/old/previously unavailable/archive material... and why stop there? I do hope it's only a matter of time before it all becomes freely available...

Don't quite know just how free this stuff can be...we're all so very fucked we only tend to value the monetery aspect of a commodity...might there be a case of too much stuff too free?